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Author: theMan
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Pleasant Dreams
Just one of her chicks roosts with Molly at night. The rest of the chicks roost on their own, though during the day, they run around with their mother. Even from a tender age, their personalities come through.
On a midsummer evening, the chickens are out late, gorging on sunflower seeds. With sunshine, good food, good friends, they should have pleasant dreams tonight. I read an interesting article that maybe even bees dream. That’s a nice image, a hive full of bees dreaming about all the flowers they visited that day.
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Intentional? Coincidental?
Raise chickens and from time to time they surprise you. Today I discovered that one of the chickens had deposited a dropping perfectly on a fallen leave. Did she do this intentionally? What are the chances of a chicken dropping landing perfectly in the middle of a leaf? If she did it intentionally, what is the message? Was it just for art’s sake, or to make it easier to clean up?
If you don’t like pausing to think, seeing wondrous things, or being surprised, don’t raise chickens.
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Green and White Babies
The shallots are blooming, sending up tall stalks full of green and white babies. Nearly three hundred miniature flowers give you plenty of time to ponder, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me …
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A Bee’s Dance
Poppies are a fun flower. I didn’t realize until today that they are a fun flower for bees too. I watched bees gathering pollen from the poppies, and the flowers are designed so that bees get a fun ride, dancing in a circle through the many anthers. With so many anthers in each flower, it doesn’t take long for a bee to gather so much pollen in its pollen baskets on its legs, that the legs become too heavy to lift.
The bees seemed to be having so much fun gathering pollen in the poppies, it makes you wonder if they look forward to the poppies opening. In comparison, tulips and lilies must be boring to bees. Those flowers are in and out, in and out, boring as can be.
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My Little Dinosaur
This six week old rooster has taken to roosting on top of a screen door in the chicken coop. He sure has that dinosaur look with his big eyes, strong beak, claws, and scrawny feathers. Maybe one day he’ll be a proud father.
According to Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-ouzel, certain bird brains are much more densely packed with neurons than mammal brains. For example, a walnut sized macaw brain has more neurons in its forebrain than a macaque monkey with a much larger, lemon sized brain. Which may mean that ounce per ounce, birds are much smarter than mammals.
However this high density of neurons is true of songbirds and parrots, not of all birds. Emu, pigeons, and junglefowl, the ancestors of chickens, don’t have a high density of neurons in their forebrains.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-ZZBJPC8c&w=560&h=315]
You can read the study here: Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain